Patrich Geddes Cities in Evolution

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CITIES IN EVOLUTION


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ES INEVOLUTIONAN INTRODUCTION TO THETOWN PLANNING MOVEMENT

AND TO THESTUDY OF CIVICS

BY

PATRICK GEDDESMEMBER AND HON. LIBRARIAN OF THE TOWN PLANNING INSTITUTE

DIRECTOR OF THE CITIES AND TOWN PLANNING EXHIBITION

WITH 59 ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDONWILLIAMS & NORGATE14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

1915


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PREFACEFROM opening chapter to concluding summary it willbe plain that this book is neither a technical treatisefor the town-planner or city councillor, nor a manualof civics for the sociologist or teacher, but is of franklyintroductory character. Yet it is not solely anattempt at the popularisation of the reviving artof town planning, of the renewing science of civics,to the general reader. What it seeks is to expressin various ways the essential harmony of all theseinterests and aims ; and to emphasise the possibilitiesof readier touch and fuller co-operation among them.All this is no mere general ethical or economic appeal,but an attempt to show, with concrete argumentsand local instances, that these too long separatedaspects of our conduct of life and of affairs may bereunited in constructive citizenship. Despite ourcontemporary difficulties industrial, social, andpolitical, there are available around us the elementsof a civic uplift, and with this, of general advance toa higher plane of industrial civilisation.The civic awakening and the constructive effortare fully beginning, in healthy upgrowth, capable not


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vi CITIES IN EVOLUTIONonly of survival but of fuller cultivation also, towardsvaried flower and fruit flower in regional and civicliterature and history, art, and science ; fruit in socialrenewal of towns and cities, small and great. Suchrenewal involves ever-increasing domestic and indi-vidual well-being, and these a productive efficiency,in which art may again vitalise and orchestrate theindustries, as of old.Nor is this " merely Utopian," though frankly

Eutopian. In matters civic, as in simpler fields ofscience, it is from facts surveyed and interpretedthat we gain our general ideas of the direction ofEvolution, and even see how to further this ; sincefrom the best growths selected we may rear yetbetter ones.

Furthermore, the book makes an appeal even tothe professed town-planner, though he already knowsthe facts it contains. For its definite principle is thatwe must not too simply begin, as do too many, withfundamentals as of communications, and thereaftergive these such aesthetic qualities of perspective andthe rest, as may be, but above all things, seek to enterinto the spirit of our city, its historic essence andcontinuous life. Our design will thus express, stimu-late, and develop its highest possibility, and so dealall the more effectively with its material and funda-mental needs.We cannot too fully survey and interpret the cityfor which we are to plan survey it at its highestin past, in present, and above all, since planning is


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PREFACE viithe problem, foresee its opening future. Its civiccharacter, its collective soul, thus in some measurediscerned and entered into, its active daily life maybe more fully touched, and its economic efficiencymore vitally stimulated. With civic energies andlife thus renewing from within, and the bettered con-dition of the people kept clearly in view, the interiorcirculation and the larger communications from with-out will become all the clearer, and be surer thanbefore of constructive efficiency and artistic effect.For civic considerations have to illuminate andcontrol geographic ones, as well as conversely.Idealism and matter of fact are thus not sundered,but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided byideals of direction, themselves unreachably beyondthe stars, yet indispensable to getting anywhere, saveindeed downwards.

Eutopia, then, lies in the city around us ; and itmust be

plannedand realised, here or nowhere, by us

as its citizens each a citizen of both the actual andthe ideal city seen increasingly as one.

Acknowledgments must be made to many friends,especially to those of the growing guild of town-planners, to whom this book might have been dedi-cated ; and if among these an individual name had tobe selected, it should be Raymond Unwin's. Againit should have been offered to other fellow-workers, inmatters of civic betterment, in Edinburgh, in London,and in Dublin ; and since these have largely been


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viii CITIES IN EVOLUTIONwomen, I should have wished to offer the book to thatmost effective and organising of civic workers, LadyAberdeen. Or again to those few pioneering states-men who have most advanced the Town PlanningMovement headed, of course, by the Rt. Hon. JohnBurns, but notably followed up by Lord Pentlandwhen Secretary for Scotland, and now for Ireland byLord Aberdeen, as in his generous interventiontowards town planning and housing for Dublin.More detailed acknowledgments must not beforgotten, as notably to Messrs Bartholomew & Sonfor permission to reproduce the population-maps inChapter II. from their Atlas of England', further toThe Welsh Outlook for figs. 16 to 19, and to theWestern Mail for the perspective of the Civic Centreat Cardiff. Several blocks and photographs havebeen communicated by Mr Ewart Culpin, Mr W. H.Godfrey, and Mr Raymond Unwin. The frontispieceand three other Edinburgh views are in the copyrightof Mr Frank Inglis of Edinburgh, and the views ofDundee and Hampstead in that of Messrs Valentine& Sons, Ltd., Dundee.

Last, but not least, I am indebted for not a fewillustrations to my friend and colleague Mr F. C.Mears ; and for help with proofs, index, and illustra-tions to my wife and daughter.The reader will notice that the book has been in

type before the war, but not a line or word has beenaltered, and only the closing sentence added ; since


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PREFACE ixthe main theses of the book and its appreciations andcriticisms of German cities are not affected by thisturn of events. The Cities and Town PlanningExhibition, of which so much has been said in thefollowing pages, has fully shared in the civic historyit illustrated, by total destruction by the vigilantand enterprising Emden, but is none the less inprocess of renewal. PATRICK GEDDES.


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CONTENTSC IAP. PAGES

1. THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES. . . . 1-242. THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEAN-

ING . . . ' . .. . - . . 25-453. WORLD - CITIES AND THEIR OPENING

COMPETITION .... . . 46-59t. PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC . . 60-83.. WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY . . 84-108(>. THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE . . . 109-1437. THE HOUSING MOVEMENT . . . . 144-1 608. TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZEN-

SHIP . 161-1759. A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY . 176-191

10. GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 192-22111. HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING IN RE-

CENT PROGRESS. . . . . . 222-24512 TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 246-29413 EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING, AND

THE NEED OF CIVICS 295-31214. THE STUDY OF CITIES . . . . . 313-32815. THE SURVEY OF CITIES 329-338


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xii CITIES IN EVOLUTION16. CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PUR-

POSES, OF MUNICIPALITIES AND GOV-ERNMENT . 339-358

17. THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 359-37518. ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT . . 376-392SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION . . . 393-402SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS .... 403-406INDEX 407-409


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSEdinburgh, looking from Princes Street towards Castle andOld Town. FrontispieceF IG. PAGE1. Salisbury: Plan in eighteenth century .... 52. Diagram of original lay-out .... 6,'J. Modern haphazard building .... 7k Edinburgh : Reconstruction of old High Street house . 9f>. Court in Canongate . . . . .10(i. Grassmarket . . . . . .117. St Nicolas, Belgium, showing large central space for

markets, etc. . . . . . . . . 128. Oxford: Plan of, 1578 149. Edinburgh: Upper High Street 17

10 and 11. Population-map of United Kingdom, with insetof coalfields . . . . . .23

12. Greater London 2713, Lancashire towns agglomerating as " Lancaston " . . 3114 Midland towns agglomerating as

" Midlandton " . . 3615. Clyde and Forth towns agglomerating as " Clyde-Forth " 4016. Miners' cottages Cardiff: fronts . . 7017. backs . 7118. Woodlands, Yorkshire : fronts . . 72

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xiv CITIES IN EVOLUTIONPAGE

19. Workers' cottages Earswick, Yorkshire: back gardens . 7320. Diagram, Town ^-Country : Country ^-Town 9621. Newcastle : Preservation of old mill in Jesmond Dene

Park 9822. Primitive dwellings : suggestion for boys' corner of public

park 10023. A children's garden in Old Edinburgh . . . .10324. Edinburgh : Confusion of small workshops behind working-class dwellings . . . . . . .10425. Edinburgh : West Princes Street Gardens . . .10626. Milne's Court 11527. Charlotte Square 12128. Back of Moray Place, with drying-greens and

mews 12329. An improved tenement house (1892) in

Upper High Street . . . .13330. Expansion of a Scottish industrial town . . . .13531. Edinburgh: Old tenements in Cowgate . . . .13632. New tenement village, Duddingston . .14033. Plan of Edinburgh, Old and New, before Railway Age . 14634. Edinburgh : Workers' cottages, Cox's gelatine works (1893) 15335. Port Sunlight : Cottages. . . . . . . 15436. Bournville : Girls' recreation ground . . . >. . 15537. New Earswick : Cottages . . . . . . 1 5638. Harborne Village : (a) Estate as planned under bye-laws ;

(6) as executed by Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd. . 15739. Edinburgh railways : type of planless growth of Railway

Age, as arresting town planning and impeding itsrecovery . . . . . . . . .159


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvF G. PACK40. Frankfort new docks, showing dockers' village, with

garden, boulevards, park and lake . * . .19741. View in Hampstead Garden Suburb .... 22442. Parks and parkway girdle for a small American city :

Roanoke . 23343. Plan of Cities and Town Planning Exhibition in Ghent,

1913 . . / . . . . . .27141. Cardiff: Model of Civic Centre . . ... . 27645. Plan of a Netherlands town (Goch) seventeenth century . 28246. Plan of Mons : Showing beginning of fortifications . . 28347. Fully fortified, eighteenth century . . 28443. Plan of Netherlands town as example of scientific

fortification of seventeenth century . . .28549. Outlook Tower, Edinburgh . . . . . .32250. showing different storeys 32451. Ramsay Garden, University Hall, Edinburgh . . . 32752. Birmingham in 1832, with its Parliamentary boundary . 3515.'}. Crosby Hall, Chelsea, as rebuilt in 1909-10 . . .37454. Garden Village, Roseburn, Edinburgh . . . .3815.5. Co-operative Tenants, Ltd.: Example of progressive

development in planning :^_. .... 3835(>. Harton Estate, South Shields : Example of changes from

conventional plan and lay-out of former years ; typeeasily adaptable to bye-law streets anywhere . . 385

57. New Leven : Design for garden suburb of a smallFifeshire town . . . . . . . 39058. Design for seal of Civics Institute of Ireland . . .391


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CITIES IN EVOLUTIONCHAPTER ITHE EVOLUTION OF CITIES

The (volution of cities is here treated, not as an exposition of origins,but as a study in contemporary social evolution, an inquiry intotendencies in progress. Difficulties of approach to civic studies,and civic betterment. Examples to arouse interest e.g. of antiquaryand artist, of builder, of housewife and artisan, etc. Needed cor-rection of popular ideas, e.g. of medieval towns. The traveller andhis need of "synoptic vision." Aristotle to Adam Smith. Defectsof current education in delaying needed progress from abstractpolitics to concrete civics. Criticisms of the former : need ofconcrete knowledge, e.g. of Dublin and Belfast, etc. The politicaland the civic attitude in London affairs, as concentrating uponelection returns and upon town plan respectively.

ALIKE in Europe and in America the problemsof the city have come to the front, and are in-creasingly calling for interpretation and for treat-ment. Politicians of all parties have to confesstheir traditional party methods inadequate to copewith them. Their teachers hitherto the nationaland general historians, the economists of this schoolor that have long been working on very differentlines ; and though new students of civics are appear-ing in many cities, no distinct consensus has yetbeen reached among them, even as to methods of


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2 'CITIES IN EVOLUTIONinquiry, still less as to results. Yet that in ourcities here, there, perhaps everywhere a newstirring of action, a new arousal of thought, havebegun, none will deny ; nor that these are alikefraught with new policies and ambitions, fresh out-looks and influences ; with which the politician andthe thinker have anew to reckon. A new socialscience is forming, a new social art developing thatmuch is surely becoming plain to every observer ofcontemporary social evolution ; and what press andparliaments are beginning to see to-day, even themost backward of town councils, the most submissiveof their voters, the most indifferent of their tax-payers, will be sharply awakened to to-morrow.Berlin and Boston, London and New York, Man-chester and Chicago, Dublin, smaller cities as well-all till lately, and still no doubt mainly, concentratedupon empire or national politics, upon finance,commerce, or manufactures is not each awakeningtowards a new and more intimate self-conscious-ness ? This civic self is still too inarticulate: wecannot give it clear expression: it is as yet mostlyin the stage of a strife of feelings, in which painand pleasure, pride and shame, misgivings andhopes are variously mingling, and from whichdefinite ideas and ideals are only beginning hereand there to emerge. Of this general fermentationof thought the present volume is a product one nodoubt only too fully retaining its incompleteness.The materials towards this nascent science are thus


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 3not merely being collected by librarians, publishedin all forms from learned monographs to passionateappealings, and from statistical tables to popularpicture-books: they are germinating in our minds,and this even as we walk the streets, as we read ournewspapers.

Shall we make our approach, then, to the study ofcities, the inquiry into their evolution, beginningwith them, as American city students commonlyprefer to do, upon their modern lines, taking themas we find them? Or shall we follow the historicand developmental method, to which so manyEuropean cities naturally invite us ? Or if some-thing of both, in what proportion, what order ? And,beyond past and present, must we not seek into ourcities' future ?The study of human evolution is not merely a

retrospect of origins in the past. That is but apalaeontology of man his Archaeology and History.It is not even the analysis of actual social processesin the present that physiology of social man is,or should be, Economics. Beyond the first questionof Whence ? Whence have things come ? and thesecond, of How? How do they live and work?the evolutionist must ask a third. Not, as of oldat best, What next? as if anything might come;but rather Whither? Whither away? For it issurely of the essence of the evolution concept hardthough it be to realise it, more difficult still to applyit that it should not only inquire how this of to-day


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4 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONmay have come out of that of yesterday, but beforeseeing and preparing for what the morrow is evennow in its turn bringing towards birth. This ofcourse is difficult so difficult as ever to be throwingus back to inquire into present conditions, and beyondthese into earlier ones; yet with the result that inthese inquiries, necessary as they are, fascinating asthey become, a whole generation of specialists, sincethe doctrine of evolution came clearly into view, havelost sight or courage to return to its main problem

that of the discernment of present tendency, amidthe apparent phantasmagoria of change.

In short, then, to decipher the origins of cities inthe past, and to unravel their life-processes in thepresent, are not only legitimate and attractive in-quiries, but indispensable ones for every student ofcivics whether he would visit and interpret world-cities, or sit quietly by his window at home. But asthe agriculturist, besides his interest in the pastpedigrees and present condition of his stock and crops,must not, on pain of ruin, lose sight of his activepreparation for next season, but value these studiesas he can apply them towards this, so it is with thecitizen. For him surely, of all men, evolution is mostplainly, swiftly in progress, most manifest, yet mostmysterious. Not a building of his city but is sound-ing as with innumerable looms, each with its manifoldwarp of circumstance, its changeful weft of life. Thepatterns here seem simple, there intricate, often mazybeyond our unravelling, and all well-nigh are chang-


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 5ing, even day by day, as we watch. Nay, these verywebs are themselves anew caught up to serve asthreads again, within new and vaster combinations.Yet within this labyrinthine civicomplex there are nomere spectators. Blind or seeing, inventive or un-thinking, joyous or unwilling each has still to weave

FIG. i. Salisbury : Plan in eighteenth century showing survival oforiginal (thirteenth-century) planning.

in, ill or well, and for worse if not for better, thewhole thread of his life.Our task is rendered difficult by the immensity of

its materials. What is to be said of cities in general,where your guide-book to Rome, or Paris, or London,is a crowded and small-typed volume? when book-sellers' windows are bright with beautifully illustratedvolumes, each for a single city? and when each ofthese is but an introduction to a mass of literaturefor every city, vast beyond anticipation? Thus,


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6 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONtaking for example one of the smallest of historiccities one now known to few in Britain, fewer stillin America, save in association with the world-famousgenerosities of one of its children, steeped early in itstraditions of patriotism and of literature Mr ErskineBeveridge's valuable Bibliography of Dunfermlinefills a bulky crown octavo of closely printed two-columned pages !

FlG. 2. Diagram of original lay-out of city blocks.

Again, each specialist, each general reader also, isapt to have his interest limited to the field of his ownexperience. If we are to interest the antiquary orthe tourist, it must be first of all from their ownpoint of view ; but we reach this if we can show them,for instance, exactly howr one of their favouritecathedral cities notably Salisbury, for choice wasplanned. At the exodus of its Bishop from OldSarum in 1220, he brought its citizens after him intowhat he had laid out as a veritable garden city ; sothat Salisbury at its beginnings six centuries ago was


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 7curiously like Letchworth or Hampstead Suburbto-day, so far as its homes were concerned. Indeed,their architects will be the first to recognise thatSalisbury had advantages of greater garden space, ofstreams carried through the streets ; not to speak ofthe great cathedral arising in its spacious close beyond.Thus interested, the antiquary is now the very manto lead us in tracing out how the present crowded

FIG. 3. Illustration of modern haphazard building over gardens.

courts and gardenless slums of Salisbury have un-mistakably (and comparatively lately) arisen fromthe deterioration of one old garden-home after another.He rediscovers for himself in detail how curiouslyand closely medieval town planning and housing,thus recovered, anticipates that of our Garden Cities ;and whether he care to renew such things or not, hecan next help us with more difficult cases, even withwhat is probably the most difficult of all Old Edin-burgh, so long the most overcrowded and deterioratedof all the world's cities yet with its past never


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8 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONwholly submerged, and thus one of the most richlyinstructive, most suggestive to the fresh-eyed observer,to the historic student. Hence here the impulse ofScott's reopening of the world-romance of history,and next of Carlyle's tragi-comic rendering of itssignificance ; here is the canvas of Robert LouisStevenson's subtly embroidered page ; and now inturn, in more scientific days, the natural centrefor the earliest of British endeavours towards theinitiation of a school of sociology with its theoriesand a school of civics with its surveys and in-terpretations.The painter may be at first harder to deal with, forhe has as yet too seldom begun to dream how manynew subjects for his art the future is here preparing,when our Garden-Suburb avenues have grown andtheir cottage roofs have mellowed. Yet we shallreach him too even next spring, for then our youngorchard will have its first blossoms, and the childrenwill be at play in it. The builder, again, eager toproceed with more cottages, is impatient of our civicdreams, and will not look at our old-world plans oftemples or cathedrals. As yet he is somewhat apt tomiss, in church, and still more in the business week,what a certain old-world aphorism concerning thefrequency of failures among those who build withoutan ideal may mean if restated in modern terms.Again, the utilitarian housewife, busy in her compactand convenient, but generally rather small and sun-less scullery, may well be incredulous when we tell


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 9her that in what have now become the slums of OldEdinburgh, for instance, this scullery was situated inthe porch, or on a covered but open first-floor balcony,until she can be shown the historic evidence, and

FIG. 4. Edinburgh : Reconstruction of old High Street houses, withopen-air galleries.

even the survivals of this. Even then, so strong ishabit, she will probably prefer her familiar arrange-ment ; at any rate until she realises how, for lack ofthis medieval and returning open-air treatment, sheor her little maid may be on the verge of consumption.


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10 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONHer husband, the skilled artisan in steady employ-ment, with bigger wages and shorter hours than hisContinental rival, may well stare to be told how muchmore there is that makes life best worth living inmany a German working-town as compared withours ; or how, were he a mechanic in Marseilles orNimes, or many another French city, he would be

FIG. 5. Surviving court in Canongate, with outside stairs, etc.

week-ending all summer with his family at their littlecountry property now looking after his vineyard, orresting under his own fig-tree. "Gibove all, let us endthis

preliminary unsettlingof

popularbeliefs as we

began. Rich man and poor, Conservative and Liberal,Radical and Socialist have all alike to be upset inmost of what they have been all their lives accustomedto hear and to repeat of the poverty and the misery andthe degradation of the towns of the Middle Ages,


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 11


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12 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONand from which they have been so often told we havein every way progressed so far by having put beforethem a few of their old plans and pictures, say fromthe Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. For there

or indeed in any public library it is easy to search

FIG. 7. St Nicolas, old town of Pays de Waes in (Belgian) Netherlands :Large central space for markets, archery butts, maypole, etc.

out the old documents, as in well-nigh every town theactual survivals, which prove how grand and spaciouswere the market and

public places,how ample thegardens, even how broad and magnificent might be

the thoroughfares, of many a medieval town. Whatis to blame in them and nowadays rightly enough-has mainly been introduced in the centuries since theMiddle Ages died the very worst of it within the


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 13industrial period, and much within our own times.If a concrete instance of this be wanted, the worldhas none to offer more dramatic and complete thanthat of the Historic Mile of Old Edinburgh, andespecially its old High Street, in which this is beingwritten. For, as we have above indicated, this massof medieval and renaissance survivals has been, andtoo nearly is still, the most squalid conglomeration, 'the most over-crowded area in the old world : evenin the new, at most the emigrant quarter of NewYork or Chicago has rivalled its evil pre-eminence.Yet our " Civic Survey of Edinburgh " shows theseevils as mainly modern, and that the town planningof the thirteenth century was conceived not onlyrelatively, but positively on lines in their way 'more spacious than those which have made our" New Town " and its modern boulevard of PrincesStreet famous.

Aristotle the founder of civic studies, as of somany others wisely insisted upon the importance,not only of comparing city constitutions (as he did,a hundred and sixty-three of them), but of seeingour city with our own eyes. He urged that ourview be truly synoptic, a word which had not thenbecome abstract, but was vividly concrete, as itsmake-up shows : a seeing of the city, and this asa whole ; like Athens from its Acropolis, like cityand Acropolis together the real Athens fromLycabettos and from Piraeus, from hill-top and fromsea. Large views in the abstract, Aristotle knew


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 15and thus compressedly said, depend upon large viewsin the concrete. Forgetting thus to base them isthe weakness which has so constantly ruined thephilosopher, and has left him, despite his marvellousabstract powers, in one age a sophist in spite ofAristotle, in another a schoolman in spite of AlbertusMagnus, or again a pedant in spite of Bacon. Soalso in later times ; and with deadly results to civics,and thence to cities. Hence the constitution-makersof the French Revolution ; or of most modern politics,still so abstract in spite of Diderot's Encyclopaedia,of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, each aboundingin wide observation. Hence, too, the long lapse ofpolitical economy into a dismal science ; althoughit arose concretely enough, first by generalising thesubstantial agricultural experience of De Quesnay inFrance, and then qualifying this by the synopticurban impressions of Adam Smith. For, as thefield-excursions of our Edinburgh School of Sociologyare wont to verify, his main life and apparently hisabstract work were primarily but the amplificationand sound digestion of his own observations notonly in maturity at Glasgow, but in boyhood andyouth in his earlier homes. Nowhere more clearlycan one realise that superiority to agriculture as ameans of wealth, of the manufactures, the shippingand the foreign trade, on which Smith insisted sostrongly, than in a ramble through the old-worldmerchant towns Kirkcaldy, Dysart, and the restwhich line the coast of Fife. For in Smith's day,


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16 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONthough not in ours, Fife was a "beggar's mantlewith a fringe of gold," as King James the Sixth andFirst so shrewdly and picturesquely described it fiveor six generations earlier ; and with exactly the sameeconomic insight.So bookish has been our past education, so strict

our school drill of the " three R's," and so well-nighcomplete our lifelong continuance among them, thatnine people out of ten, sometimes even more, under-stand print better than pictures, and pictures betterthan reality. Thus, even for the few survivingbeautiful cities of the British Isles, their few mar-vellous streets for choice the High Street of Oxfordand the High Street of Edinburgh a few well-chosen picture postcards will produce more effectupon most people's minds than does the actual visionof their monumental beauty there colleges andchurches, here palace, castle, and city's crown. Sincefor the beauty of such streets, and to their bestelements of life and heritage, we have become half-blind, so also for their deteriorated ones; especiallywhen, as in such old culture-cities, these may largelybe the fossilisation of learning or of religion, and notmerely the phenomena of active decay. Yet eventhese we realise more readily from the newspaper'sbrief chronicle, than from the weltering misery toooften before our eyes.

Happily the more regional outlook of science isbeginning to counteract this artificial blindness. Thefield-naturalist has of course always been working in


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1

&bfl5CU0,


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18 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONthis direction. So also the photographer, the painter,the architect ; their public also are following, andmay soon lead. Even open-air games have been forthe most part too confined and subjective : it isbut yesterday that the campers -out went afield;to-day the boy scouts are abroad; to-morrow ouryoung airmen will be recovering the synoptic vision.Thus education, at all its levels, begins to tear awaythose blinkers of many print-layers which so longhave been strapped over our eyes.Whether one goes back to the greatest or to thesimplest towns, there is little to be learnt of civics byasking their inhabitants. Often they scarcely knowwho are their own town councillors, or, if they do,they commonly sneer at them ; albeit these aregenerally better citizens than those who elect them.They have forgotten most of the history of their owncity ; and the very schools, till at any rate the otherday, were the last places where you could learn any-thing about it. They even wish to forget it: itseems to them often something small and petty tobe interested in its affairs. The shallow politician'ssneer has done deadly work from Shetland to Corn-wall ; what should have been their best townsfolkhave too long felt above meddling with mere local"gas and sewage." Even the few thinking youngmen and women in each social caste with exceptionsof course, now more and more counting are not yetcitizens, either in thought or deed. If not absorbedby party politics, they more commonly think of be-


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 19coining administrators, and state officialism is farmore attractive than the city's ; the " civil service "is familiar to all, but civic service a seldom-heardphrase, a still rarer ambition. Do they dabble aspolhical economists ? High abstracts and sublimatesof all these common types of mind are found in allgroups and parties, and are to be diagnosed not bytheir widely differing party opinions, but by theircommon blankness to civics. One is all for TariffReform, his fellow argues no less convincingly forFree Trade ; one stands for Home Rule, and anotherfor Central Government ; one is all for peace, anotherhot for war, and so on. Yet "practical politicians"as they all alike claim to be, to us students of citiesthey seem alike unpractical, unreal ; since un-observant, that is ignorant, of this concrete geo-graphical world around them, uninterested in it.Suppose you venture into the subject of Germany,for instance, and attempt any conversation aboutparticular German cities and their respective activitiesand interests ; you inquire where the interest, say, ofBerlin may differ from that of London ; where that,say, of Hamburg may partly differ, partly coincide,or where that other may be comparatively indifferent ?You soon find how much these cities are all one tothem ; and you risk seeming " unpatriotic," and thisto both alike, if you would have them know more.Such a Tariff Reformer, and his complemental FreeTrader, are in agreement in having no suggestions,and even no use, for a Survey of Liverpool and beside


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20 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONit another of Manchester, though these of all citiesshould surely help us towards a fuller understandingof such questions. Their neighbours at the nextbeer-counter or tea-table, hotly discussing Unionismand Home Rule, and thus necessarily bandying" Belfast " and " Dublin," are commonly no less poorin those concrete images of either city, which ourcivic studies are accumulating ; and hence in anyverifiable general ideas about them also. " Boston,"it is said, "is not a place; it is a state of mind."Does not the same apply to the " Belfast " and the" Dublin " we hear so much of, whether in Parliamentor in Press? After spending a single summer (ofcourse a time most insufficient, but more than mostof even the leaders of controversy would care to give)upon the study of these two great cities, one becomesdeeply impressed by this distrust. Neither city is sosimple as it is made out.To get down to the essential facts and processesof the life of cities, let us take a city where there isno burning political question prominent just now.Say, then, Edinburgh, of which our survey, manyyears in progress, is least incomplete.Edinburgh ? Edinburgh ! A Scottish member

would be the first to blush for such provincialism.Is he still a student? Admittedly not. We haveroused the politician, and he reproves us in vigorousstrain. He is not going back to the Heptarchy, thathe should be asked to map out its petty provinces,much less survey their constituent boroughs : he is


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 21not going to concern himself with the parish pump !Well, though the very importance of London makesit easier to begin with smaller and more intelligibleplaces, let us return thither and do our best.Some years ago three or four members of theSociological Society, including the writer, werehonoured by an invitation to take part in a sym-posium, which agreed to dine at one of the greatpolitical clubs and then to discuss " The PossibleFuture of London Government." We listenedmeekly and long, gradually learning what this titlemeant : not, as we innocently had expected, and evenimagined we had been promised, a foresight of betterorganisation for the great city, a discussion of whatimprovements and expansions this better organisationmight realise, and even some vision of Utopia beyond.Not at all. It amounted to nothing, in brief, savethe transposition of Ins and Outs, the substitution/^of Outs for Ins. Only when in the fulness of timethis subject was temporarily exhausted, was it re-membered that a sociological deputation was inattendance. We were then asked to speak : andnow, to do the chairman justice, quite to the point,as we had understood it. So our first spokesmanbegan "May I have a plan of London?" "Certainly,"said the chairman ; but there was none forthcoming." Then an atlas will do " (remembering that the clubpossesses a not inconsiderable library). " Certainly ;what atlas?" "Conveniently the Royal GeographicalSociety's Atlas of England

and Wales." The waiter


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22 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONagain returns with the librarian's regrets that theyhave not got it. " Well, any atlas at all 1 Therewill surely

be some map of London, on which wecan make out its constituent and adjacent boroughs?"Final return of waiter " Librarian very sorry, sir ;he has no atlas in the library." Our spokesman'sopening under these circumstances was brief. " That,gentlemen, expresses clearly the difference betweenyour political idea of London and our sociologicalone. We have understood you perfectly ; your pointof view was very interesting to us ; but only whenyou have got an atlas, and used it, will you understandours." However, he drew a rough plan ; and we ex-plained our views as best we could but with scantydiscussion and soon farewells, not followed byreinvitation.Hence we have to appeal to the reader, their

accepted judge, as here ours. Has he an atlas onwhich cities can be made out ? At any rate he hasaccess to one the Royal Geographical Society'sAtlas of England and Wales aforesaid (Bartholomew,Edinburgh, 1902) in the nearest public library. Ifit be not there, let the librarian have no peace till hegets it. For he will find that it contains the one andonly really good map he has ever seen indeed theonly adequate one yet in existence of the distribu-tion of the population of England ; London and itsboroughs, and all the towns of England as well ; butno longer as the mere dots scattered over the map,which we learned long ago at school before we were


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THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 23

FIGS. 10 and 11. Population-map of United Kingdom, with inset of Coalfields of same.


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24 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONinterested in them, and so have largely forgotten,like so much of the same kind. By courtesy of itspublishers we here supply a reproduction of it ; butas this is necessarily greatly reduced, and moreoverwithout colouring, reference should also be madeto the large and vivid original. We shall see someof its uses in the next chapter.


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CHAPTER IITHE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING

The Population-Map and its uses. London ("Greater London") as aspreading man-reef. Even its modern form of government, affordedby the L.C.C., is constantly being outgrown. Need of inquiry intosmaller cities and city-groups. But here the same growth-processappears, industrial towns and cities uniting into vast city-regions," conurbations," which the broadest surveys are needed to realise.Conception of urban Lancashire as the vastest of conurbations,exceeding Greater London itself, and yet now demanding com-prehensive foresight and civic statesmanship as a whole. Besidethis vast "Lancaston" are arising other colossal city-groups, heregeneralised as "West Riding," "South Riding," " Midlandton,"' k Southwaleston," and " Tyne-Wear-Tees." Thus is arising averitable New Heptarchy, whose water supplies and coalfields, andkindred local affairs, are thus the essentials of national existence, nolonger negligible as the mere "parish pump" and "coal-cellar" ofmetropolitan politics. Similar conception of Greater Glasgow andEdinburgh, as " Clyde-Forth." New forms of civic and ruralorganisation thus becoming needed, yet before these, fullersurveys, deeper diagnoses ; and further again, preliminary con-ferences representations of all concerned, of all aspects therefore,as well as interests.

GIVEN, then, our population-map, what has it to showus ? Starting from the most generally known beforeproceeding towards the less familiar, observe first themapping of London here plainly shown, as it isproperly known, as Greater London with its vastpopulation streaming out in all directions east, west,north and south flooding all the levels, flowing up

25


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26 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONthe main Thames valley and all the minor ones,filling them up, crowded and dark, and leaving onlythe intervening patches of high ground pale. Here,then, and in the coloured original of course moreclearly, we have the first, and (up to the time of itsmaking) the only, fairly accurate picture of thegrowing of Greater London. This octopus ofLondon, polypus rather, is something curious ex-ceedingly, a vast irregular growth without previousparallel in the world of life perhaps likest to thespreadings of a great coral reef. Like this, it has astony skeleton, and living polypes call it, then, a"man-reef" if you will. Onward it grows, thinly atfirst, the pale tints spreading further and faster thanthe others, but the deeper tints of thicker populationat every point steadily following on. Within lies adark and crowded area; of which, however, thedaily pulsating centre calls on us to seek some freshcomparison to higher than coralline life. Here, atany rate, all will agree, is an approximation to thereal aspect of Greater London as distinguished fromHistoric London. What matter to us, who look atit for the moment in this detached way from veryfar above, or even really to the actual citizens them-selves to-day, those old boundaries of the counties,which were once traced so painfully and are still sostrictly maintained, from use and wont or for purposesother than practical ones ? What really matternowadays the divisions between innumerable con-stituent villages and minor boroughs whose historic


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 27names are here swallowed up, apparently for ever,like those microscopic plants, those tiny plants andanimals, which a big spreading amosba so easilyincludes, so resistlessly devours? Here for mostpractical purposes is obviously a vast new unity, longago well described as "a province covered with

FIG. 12. Greater London.

houses." Indeed a house-province, spreading over,absorbing, a great part of south-east England. Eventhe outlying patches of dense population alreadyessentially belong to it ; some for practical purposesentirely, like Brighton. Instead of the ^dJines_Qfdivsion we have new lines of union : the very word"lines" nowadays most readily suggesting the rail-ways, which are the throbbing arteries, the roaringpulses of the intensely living whole ; or, again, sug-gesting 4the telegraph wires running beside them, so


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28 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONmany nerves, each carrying impulses of idea andaction either way. It is interesting, it is necessaryeven, to make an historic survey of London anembryology, as it were of this colossal whole. Weshould, of course, look first into its two historic cities ;we should count in its many boroughs as they grewup before being absorbed ; we should take note of,however easily we forget, its innumerable absorbedold villages and hamlets, its ever new and everspreading dormitory areas loosely built and distantfor the rich, nearer and more crowded for the middleclass, and where shall we seek or put the worker orthe poor? We see, we recognise these manycorporate or at least associated units of the bodypolitic, all growing more and more fully into one vastagglomerate, and this with its own larger corporategovernment, its County Council, Yet even this isalready far outgrown ; but in time, if the growth-process continues, as in every way obviously underpresent conditions it must, this governing body mustovertake the spreading growth, and bring all that isreally functional London into its province, witheconomy and advantage to the vast majority of allconcerned. Of course, in a general way, all this isalready known to the reader to Londoners, greateror smaller ; but does it not gain a new vividness withsuch a map before us, a new suggestiveness also ?Do we not see, and more and more clearly as westudy it, the need of a thorough revision of ourtraditional ideas and boundaries of country and


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 29town ? As historians and topographers we cannottoo faithfully conserve the record of all these absorbedelements ; but as practical men governing, or beinggoverned, we have practically done with them. Letthe Lord Mayor of London and his Corporationsurvive by all means, as historic monuments and forauld lang syne ; let there be for the historic City, andfor the neighbouring boroughs not merely West-minster, but every regional unit that can practicallyjustify it, and so far as may be local autonomy too.We are making no plea for over-centralisation ; onthe contrary, we are inclined to think that manyganglia may be needed to maintain the health of sovast and multi-radiate a body politic. But theessential thing is that common arrangements for lifeand health and efficiency be made in the mainaccording to the present and the opening develop-ments, and not maintained unduly upon the lines ofhistory ; otherwise we shall continue to have localfriction, overlapping and wastage, arrests and en-cystments, congestions, paralysis even, instead of thegeneral and local health and economy we surely allof us desire.Look now at the map of London with any friend, or,

if possible, with two a Progressive and a Moderate.What real difference survives between them whenthey sit down like plain, open-minded citizens to lookat the map the original, if possible, we again repeat.Do they not agree that both their parties woulddo well to sit down to it also, to survey the whole


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30 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONsituation afresh ? If so, our plea for City Survey isgrowing intelligible ; and even its economy, itspositive fruitfulness, would before long begin toappear. As, however, our Progressive and Moderatefriends continue these studies, and as the vastness ofthe problems of London thus increases upon them,they will admit that they are, separately or collect-ively, unable clearly to realise all that is going on inthis vast man-reef, and still more to foresee what themorrow will bring forth. Still, one has this definitebit of knowledge and the other that now of the partof London where he was brought up or lived as ayoung man or of the places where he works and livesnow. So gradually we piece together in conversationa good deal of useful knowledge, it may be even ofpractical suggestion, here and there. But as our twotype-Londoners' studies go on, as with growinginterest they would, they would soon come to newpoints of difficulty, to problems too vast readily to begrappled with ; and one would ask another, " Cannotwe learn something as to this from what they aredoing in smaller places, in simpler cities than thistremendous London of ours ? There is Birmingham,it might help us." The other might agree ; and evenremember that he had heard from an American friendof an active municipality in Glasgow. Suppose theylook them up in the atlas. Alas ! these also havespread beyond the simple dots we learned to identifyas school-boys ; and instead we see great and growingmasses, each essentially like another London. Let us


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 31try Lancashire, with its great cities ; that will surelyhelp us. There is Manchester, with its great Liberaland Free Trade record ; there is Liverpool, with itsequally strong Conservatism ; they surely must havethreshed matters out between them. But behold,upon our map these, too, are fast becoming little morethan historic expressions. The fact is that we have

FIG. 13. Lancashire towns agglomerating as " Lancaston."

here another vast province almost covered with house-groups, swiftly spreading into one, and already con-nected up at many points, and sometimes by morethan sufficient density of population along the mainlines of communication. Here, far more than evenLancashire commonly realises, is growing up againanother Greater London as it were a city-region ofwhich Liverpool is the seaport and Manchester themarket, now with its canal port also ; while Oldham,and the many other factory towns, more accuratelycalled " factory districts," are the workshops. Even


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32 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONif this process be not in all respects so far advancedas in London, and as yet not organised in practiceunder any common government, is it not becomingfairly plain, a matter of reasonable foresight, that ifgrowth and progress are to continue much longer asthey have long been doing in some respects of latefaster than ever the separate and detached towns,whose names we learned at school and still for localpurposes employ, will become mainly of minor anddistrict usefulness, postal and what not, like thepractically unified cities and boroughs of London ?Hence, if we are to avoid the many mistakes andmisfortunes of London through the past delay andpresent confusions of its organisation and government,is it not time to be thinking of, and even to be start-ing, a unified survey of Urban Lancashire ? This, asin the case of Greater London, we should consider atevery point with the utmost respect to local historyand even to administrative autonomy, yet also as partof a greater whole, already only too much consol-idated at many points, and still growing together.Is it asked, " Of what use is all this ? " Of many uses,but enough here if we cite two Public Health andTown Planning. Only a word, then, of each ; andfirst Public Health.

These great communities are already exercisedyet in most cases not nearly exercised enough abouttheir sanitation and their water supply ; and here ourperipatetic Health Congresses and their papers havesome arousing influence, though not yet sufficient.


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 33Moreover, if better crops of human population (as weare nil becoming determined) are to be grown thanthe present one, the question of a fuller and a farmore vital access of youth to the country and tocountry life and occupations must assume an in-comparably greater importance, and correspondinglygreater space than that which has yet been given itby municipalities even with the most exemplary ofParks Departments, bright patches though theseshow amid our vast labyrinths of streets.Even in the town-planning movement this en-larged way of looking at our enlarging cities is notnearly common enough. The architect is accustomedto single buildings, or to street plans at most ; thecity engineer is accustomed to streets, or to street-quarters at most ; and both are reluctant to enlargetheir vision. They still speak as if any such wideoutlook and foresight were " ahead of the times ""

might be useful fifty years hence" and so on

through a dozen variants of the grumbling protestswhich are a main symptom of the senile phase,which fixity to environment may bring on at allages. But now, returning to Public Health, in eachand every one of the Congresses of Health andSanitation which now meet so anxiously from yearto year in one after another of these great cities, isit not obvious to every member of these, as regardsthe large cities around them, that they are lateenough even if they begin forthwith ? Their accessesto Nature and natural conditions have already been


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34 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONthree-fourths destroyed ; indeed more, so far as theworking mother and her children are concernedthat is, the nation of to-morrow. The neighbouringgreat towns are rapidly linking up by tramways andstreets no less than railways ; while great open spaces,which might have been not so long ago cheaplysecured as unrivalled lungs of life, are already all butirrecoverable.Here are already solid arguments for our proposed

survey, and they might be strengthened and amplified,were not our problem here and in this volume mainlythe clearing of ideas before the shaping of policy.To focus these developments, indeed transforma-tions, of the geographic tradition of town andcountry in which we were brought up, and expressthem more sharply, we need some little extension ofour vocabulary ; for each new idea for which wehave not yet a word deserves one. Some name, then,for these city -regions, these town aggregates, iswanted. Constellations we cannot call them ; con-glomerations is, alas ! nearer the mark at present, butit may sound unappreciative ; what of " Conurba-tions ? " That perhaps may serve as the necessaryword, as an expression of this new form of popula-tion-grouping, which is already, as it were sub-consciously, developing new forms of social groupingand of definite government and administration byand by also.For our first conurbation the name of Greater

London is obviously already dominant beyond possi-


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 35bility of competition ; but we need some name forthe Lancashire region also, and for each similar onewe may discover. Failing a better name, since wecannot sink Liverpool and other cities in a " GreaterManchester " or the like, let us christen the vast con-urbation of the Lancashire millions as "Lancaston."It is this ''Survey of Lancaston" which its con-stituent cities and boroughs most need to realise ;and this both in detail and in mass. Imagine itphotographed from an aeroplane journey, as well asmapped street by street, like Mr Booth's LondonSurvey, indeed, in some ways, more fully still.Towards the former of these requirements we havelittle or nothing since Bartholomew's map, already sooften referred to ; and in all these ways we cangradually accustom ourselves to visualise the region.What are its existing defects ? and what its remain-ing possibilities ? What natural reserves still remainto separate its growing villages and suburbs ? Whatgardens and allotments are still possible to sanifythem ?

Leaving Lancaston, we have but to cross thePemlines to see along the foot of their eastward slopeanother dark galaxy of towns. Huddersfield, Brad-ford, and their neighbours constitute the world-metropolis of wool no less distinctly than doesLancaston that of cotton. What shall we call thisprovince, this natural city-alliance ? Why not, in anurban sense, as of old a rustic one, simply preservethe good name of West Riding? Similarly for


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36 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONSouth Riding, as we may call the conurbation cen-tring round the steel and coal of Sheffield. Note,again, the present expansion of Birmingham, which hasof late legitimately succeeded in having its overflowingsuburbs unified with itself, its extraordinary growthrecognised, as now a city rivalling even Manchester

FIG. 14. Midland towns agglomerating as " Midlandton."

or Glasgow. Invigorated by absorbing its outlyingsuburbs, Birmingham is already planning new exten-sions upon that bold and generous scale of civic designnot so long ago characteristic of great cities ; butlapsed, eclipsed, forgotten with the coming on of theRailway Age. Yet this present expansion is but astep in the old process. A yet fuller recognition ofregional facts is what we are here pleading ; for therecent Birmingham Extension Act has little if any


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 37adequately natural regional basis, but is only atemporary and makeshift expansion after all, especi-ally if prosperity and growth are to continue, as seemsreasonably probable. This larger recognition ofregional facts involves the conception of a largercity-region " Midlandton," as we may perhaps callit : and Greater and growing Birmingham is but thecapical of this, though its exact limits may be hardto define. The recent union of the " Five Towns "is thus not only a local event, but a regional pioneer-ing, a noteworthy example of an incipient urban re-grouping. And here let us hope that the Duke ofSutherland's generous gift of Trentham may similarlyaugur a period of better and closer relations of townand country throughout the land than have beenthose of yesterday.

Pass next to South Wales, where on its magnificentcoalfield the same process of development is at work.And, speaking of coalfields, we may convenientlyhere call attention to the close coincidence of thisgreat centre of population with its magnificent SouthWales coalfield, in the small inset map of the nationalcoal-cellars in the top right-hand corner, and thencenote the parallelism of each great conurbation to itscoalfield, save in the case of London alone. Weplainly see the development of a Greater Cardiff, averitable (South) Waleston, whose exact limits andrelation to the metallurgic centre of Swansea are,of course, for its regional geographer to define. Passnext northwards to the Tyne towns, with which we


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38 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONmust plainly also take those of Wear and Tees, asconstituting a new regional community, a naturalprovince Tyne-Wear-Tees, we may perhaps call it.It is interesting in this connection to recall that ourBritish Gallery at the Brussels Exhibition of 1910,unhappily burned down, was adorned with a well-painted perspective of this very region, shown withall its towns connected up by railways and roads, andpresented as a bird's-eye view (or, as we may nowa-days say, an aeroplane view) from above the sea-coast.For does not this map clearly suggest that theeconomic and social unity of such new city-regions,such conurbations as are here described, is alreadybecoming conscious to them ? The preparation andexhibition of such diagrammatic perspectives wouldbe of no little service in making these ideas clear toall concerned, and in enabling the public and therulers of each to realise the new situation, the newsolidarity which are arising towards a fuller integra-tion, a higher unity of the body politic. The greatmaps of railway systems, which are at once a con-venience and an adornment of German station-halls,have no little value and educational influence: so,and far more intensively, might enlargements of theconurbation-maps, which we are here discussing, bringbefore the public the needed conception of a localwithin a more general citizenship.

In conclusion, let us pass to Scotland. Here, again,the history and geography of popular notions, those ofthe school books on which we were brought up, and


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 39on which our children are still examined, are nolonger adequate.G lasgow, as everybody knows, is the main centre of

activity and population in Scotland, far outnumber-ing and outweighing Edinburgh ; it is the real capitalin many respects. And Greater Glasgow in thefullest sense, that in which we speak of GreaterLondon is something far vaster than the presentname and burgh limits at all describe ; it includespractically the Clyde ports and watering-places, andruns far into Ayrshire, with inland burghs andvillages not a few. It spreads far up the Clydevalley, indeed reaches its strenuous hands across theisthmus to Falkirk and Grangemouth, while itsmerchants have their villas at Stirling and beyond,as far as Bridge of Allan and even Dunblane. Again,plainly, old thinly-populated provinces are on theway to be covered with houses. Edinburgh has nodoubt its marked regional individuality ; and in itsimmediate growth is, more than is commonly realised,with Leith and minor towns and suburbs alreadyapproaching half a million: it is perhaps destined,with due development of its not inconsiderable ad-jacent coalfields, to double this within the century.Though, from historic tradition and from presentholiday associations, most people, even in Scotland,still think of the Scots as in the main a nation ofhardy rustics, no population in the world is now sopredominantly urban, and, as sanitary reformersknow, none so ill-housed at that. More than half


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40 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONthe population of Scotland is crowded upon thiscentral isthmus; and, with the approaching con-struction of the Clyde and Forth Canal (which isso plainly a matter not only of Scottish, but even ofnational, imperial, and international policy), it isclear that we shall have a linking up of these twogreat cities and their minor neighbours of Scotlandinto a new conurbation a bi-polar city-region indeed,

FIG, 15. Clyde and Forth towns agglomerating as " Clyde-Forth."

which is more and more uniting into one vast bi-regional capital Clyde-Forth, as we may soon learnto call it.

Glasgow and Edinburgh are, of course, far remoterin type and spirit than their nowadays small railwaydistance implies ; and this difference, even contrast,is natural, inevitable, and so far permanent, for theyare really the respective regional capitals of East andWest Scotland, and contrasted in many ways geo-graphical and meteorological, racial and spiritual. ToGlasgow indeed the contrast with Edinburgh may


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 41seem as great as that between Liverpool and York ;while a still larger contrast might be made from theEdinburgh point of view, as that between the maincities of Sweden and of Norway, of both of whichScotland in many ways is a condensed miniature ; say,a Stockholm with Upsala for Edinburgh, and forGlasgow a greater Bergen and Christiania. Townsso widely distinct in nature and race, in traditions,arid in social functioning and structure do not easilyrecognise that even they are but the poles of a vastand growing conurbation : yet here, too, the growth-process is at work, and tends largely to submergeall differences beneath its rising tide. And, broadlyspeaking, the main limit of the modern city is thatof the hour's journey or thereby, the maximum whichbusy men can face without too great deduction fromtheir day's work ; and hence it is above all with theconstant extension and acceleration of the means ofcommunication that each conurbation arises andextends.

It is interesting now to return to the map andmake our main conurbations clear, each upon itscoalfield. Running downwards, and leaving Clyde-Forth to Scotland, we have in England (1) Tyne-Wear-Tees, (2) Lancaston, (3) West Riding, (4) SouthRiding, (5) Midlanton, (6) Waleston, each a coalfieldwith its vast conurbation ; while Greater London,without a coalfield, forms the seventh of our series.What is this but a New Heptarchy, which has been fgrowing up naturally, yet almost unconsciously to


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42 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONpoliticians, beneath our existing, our traditionalpolitical and administrative network: and plainly,not merely to go on as at present, straining andcracking and bursting this old network, but soonsurely to evolve some new form of organisationbetter able to cope with its problems than are thepresent distinct town and county councils. Whatare the new forms to be ?

Leaving this sphinx-riddle for the present, andturning once more to the map, we recognise plainlyenough that our political friend who was " not goingback to the Heptarchy " will have to go forward toit, indeed is already in it. Let him now observeclosely, in the very middle of our map, a greatirregular white patch practically blank of population,and separating Lancaston from South Riding andWest Riding, which, indeed, already are well-nighrun together. This white patch represents the heightsof the Pennines, and consequently the water supplyof these vast and growing populations on either side.Here, in fact, accurately speaking in synoptic vision,is their " Parish Pump," one, however, no longer tobe despised; but precisely the most important, theultimate and determinant condition of population,and the inexorable limit of their growth. Coal will.still last a long time, and cotton might expandaccordingly; but water is the prime necessity after[air itself, and, unlike it, is limited in quantity. Foodcan be brought for almost any conceivable populationas long as ships can sail the seas, and we have the


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 43wherewithal to buy ; famine one can survive formonths ; total starvation even for weeks ; but with-out water we last barely three days. Parish Pumpindeed ! the prime necessity of regional statesmanship,since even of bare survival. For life and health, forcleanliness and beauty, for manufactures too, whatmore need be said ? Now, though our politicians arethus behindhand, are thus, as a class, regionally blind,geographically next to null, and for practical purposeswell-nigh all mere Londoners, the elements of a realParliament for these matters are developing. Witnessnotably the Health Congresses aforesaid. Thus at theBirkenhead Congress of 1910 there was much serious,and even anxious, discussion of the future of sanita-tion and of water supply for the Lancaston area, andthis voiced at once by local experts and by nationalauthorities like Sir William Ramsay ; of whom, asalso the most eminent of scientific Londoners, evenour politicians aforesaid may have heard, and maywell stand in some fear of, if they sneer before himat the Parish Pump.Return now to the question What are the new

social forms to be ? It is not yet safe for us tospeculate upon this until the needful Regional Surveyis for more advanced. One suggestion, however, ispractical enough ; there should be, and that speedilyand increasingly, amicable conference among all therepresentatives, rustic and urban, of the various citiesand county-regions concerned ; and, as a matter offact, various beginnings of this are being forced into


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44 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONexistence by the sheer pressure of their commoninterests. Such meetings will gradually increasein number, in usefulness, in co-operation, and by-and-by take more permanent form. The oldBorough Councils and County Councils can nolonger separately cope with what are becoming soplainly yet larger Regional and Inter-Regionaltasks, like those of water supply and sanitationfor choice, but obviously others also. The growthof London and its County Council, its separateboroughs, is thus repeating itself; and its examplemerits study, alike for its suggestiveness and forits warnings. While, conversely, to the Londonersuch .regional excursions may be suggestive. Thecontrasts of " London and the provinces," as Spend-ing-town and Earning-towns, again of Taxing-townand Paying-towns, and various others, also arise,and might lead him far.

It may not yet be time to press for political re-arrangements : this might too readily come to meanpremature disputes and frictions, not to speak oflegal difficulties and expenses. But it is plainly timefor the co-operation of the regional geographer withthe hygienist, and ofboth with the concrete sociologist,the student of country and town, of village and city ;and also for the furtherance of their labours, thediscussion of them in detail, in friendly conferencesrepresentative of all the various groupings andinterests concerned.

Since these pages were written, and indeed read at


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THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 45the Health Congress of 1910, a prominent ministerhas raised the question of the needed and approach-ing movement towards decentralisation ; and this inlargely kindred form : while later events are pointingin the same direction. The preceding argument may,however, best be left unaltered, as on strictly civicgrounds and of non-party character. The present co-operation of all the administrative bodies of GreaterLondon towards the preparation of a town-plan may,however, be mentioned as an example which mustsoon be followed in other conurbations.


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CHAPTER IIIWORLD-CITIES AND THEIR OPENING COMPETITION

City-regions in other countries : e.g. France, Germany, United States.City - evolution still only beginning and existing cities ever beingrebuilt. Other forms of industrial aggregation : example of Norway

in association with the recent developments of electric industries,from the " white coal " of mountain streams. Nature of theseindustries, and advantages to population concerned. Analogouscase of Switzerland, of French, Italian, and other mountain districts.Relative backwardness and danger of this and other coal-usingcountries in realising this advent of a new industrial age, a secondIndustrial Revolution.

So far our New Heptarchy. But if such interpreta-tion of the main groupings of our cities, towns,villages into conurbations overflowing or absorbingthe adjacent country be a substantially correctdescription of the general trend of present-day evolu-tion, then we may expect to find something of thesame process in analogous city-regions elsewhere ; itcan scarcely be a mere island marvel. France, withits slow population growth, and its comparative lackof coalfields to raise towns from, is naturally notproducing such vast industrial conurbations as ours,though around Lille, for instance, there is no smallbeginning. Yet there is a Greater Paris; the vastsuburban quarters outside the fortifications of Paris

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WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 47have: obvious and general analogies to the dormitoriesoutside the present County Council London ; andany traveller who is patient enough to stay in histhrough carriage, and endure the round-about north-easterly passage by St Denis from the Gare du Nordto that of the P.L.M., instead of driving through thecity from station to station, will agree that here, atleast, is going on an urban growth of confused andlabyrinthine squalor, little, if at all, inferior to anyof our own ! Along the Riviera, of late years, thepleasure and health resorts have grown rapidly, andin a great many cases they are running together ; atthe present rate our not very distant successors will seean almost continuous town, and of one monotonoustype as far as man can make it, for a couple ofhundred miles. Berlin has, of course, rapidly beenovertaking Paris throughout the last generation ;and the designs of its latest town-planning com-petition show that it is now following the exampleof Vienna in dealing far more largely and boldly withits outlying suburbs than have London, or most othergreat cities. For an example of our characteristicBritish type, the development of a great conurbationupon a coalfield, we have no small beginnings inWestphalia. But here also is rapidly growing upa great, powerful, and in many ways magnificentregional capital in Diisseldorf, which was recentlybut a small " Residenzstadt," not so much biggerthan the old village its modest name commemorates :it seems now

plainlydestined to distance Cologne


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48 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONalmost as Leeds has done York. Yet the organisa-tion and the civic energy of these German centres soincomparably surpass

those of Yorkshire cities orothers that such comparisons can only be made in arough and merely suggestive way.

In the United States, with their rapid developmentof resources and corresponding increase of population,there is still ample room for growth ; yet even herecities are already flowing together ; and the Pitts-burgh region is but a conspicuous example of a BlackCountry, in which increase and pressure, if not fore-sight, must soon involve some conurban survey andreorganisation. How vigorously the problem oflinking up a great regional metropolis to its sur-rounding towns and their province must be graspedis probably as yet nowhere better evidenced than hasbeen shown in Mr Burnham's bold and masterfulplanning of the region around Chicago, no less thanin his proposals for the city in itself; whatever, ofcourse, be the criticisms of his suggestions in detailThe present Greater New York, now linked up, onboth sides, by colossal systems of communicationsabove and below its dividing waters, is also rapidlyincreasing its links with Philadelphia itself no meancity and with minor ones without number in everydirection possible. For many years past it has paidto have tramway lines continuously along the roadsall the way from New York to Boston, so that, takingthese growths altogether, the expectation is notabsurd that the not very distant future will see


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WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 49practically one vast city-line along the Atlantic Coastfor five hundred miles, and stretching back at manypoints ; with a total of, it may be, well-nigh as manymillions of population. Again, the Great Lakes,with the immense resources and communicationswhich make them a Nearctic Mediterranean, havea future, which its exponents claim may becomeworld-metropolitan

in its magnitude. Even of Texaswhich Europeans, perhaps even Americans, are aptto forget has an agricultural area comparable to thatof France and Germany put together, and a betteraverage climate it has been claimed that with in-tensive culture it might well-nigh feed a populationcomparable to that of the civilised world.Our Population-Map of the United Kingdom maythus be a forecast of the future of the coalfield areasof the United States : and the accompanying Popula-tion Map of the Eastern and Central Regions is thusbut a faint sketch towards those coming conurbationswhich it is time to be preparing for.Of the needful water supplies of all these potentialconurbations we leave engineers to speak ; but foodsupplies are conceivable enough, and at all standards,from the too generous dietary of the American hotelto those innumerable costermongers' barrows ofcheap and enormous bananas which range throughthe poorer streets of New York, and grimly suggesta possible importation of tropical conditions, towardsthe maintenance and multiplication of an all toocheap proletariat. What, in fact, if our present con-4


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50 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONditions of food supply and of mechanical employmentsbe tending to produce for us conditions hithertoonly realised, and in simpler ways, by the teemingmillions of China? And what of China herself,already so populous, when her present introductionof Occidental methods and ideas has developed herenormous latent resources of coal, of cheap watercommunications, as well as railways and the rest ?Yet in this old country of ours, in so many wayssleepier than we can now think China herself, howmany will still tell you that " there is no need fortown planning, the cities are all built " ; whereas,taking even the Empire, and much more the worldover, the process seems practically but beginning ;while have not our existing cities, for the most part,before long to be well-nigh built all over again ?True, town-planning schemes, as modest tackings-on,patchings and cobblings, are being considered, evenattempted, here and there ; yet we assuredly needfar more than these if we are even to "muddlethrough " in the ever reopening worid-struggle forexistence ; far more as we realise that the supremearbitrament of social survival and success is ultimatelyneither that of militarist conflicts, nor of industrialmuddles, but of civic and regional reorganisation. Inthis the broadest views of international struggle andof industrial competition combine into a higher one.

But from these visions of indefinitely numerousand multitudinous conurbations, each of teeming


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WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 51boroughs, it is a relief to turn away in search of somesmaller, simpler, and surely healthier and happiertype of social development and integration. Happilya new and vivid example of that also is not far toseek. Every school-boy knows something at least ofthe historic significance of Norway, that poorest oflands which, as Norse children tell, was left altogetherwithout soil at the Creation, arid so has for its fewupland farms only such few particles of soil as itskindly guardian angels could sweep up and bringthither on their wings from the leavings of the richerworld. As some compensation, however, their manyrivers were rich in salmon ; and these taught theirfishermen to venture out along the calm "swan'spath " of the fiords as sea-fishers, and in comparativesafety to master the art of sailing, behind their longisland-breakwater. Thus trained and equipped, theirmerchant-history, emigration-history, pirate-history,conqueror - history follows, with what effects onEurope everyone knows : but what we do not as yetsufficiently realise in other countries whose ideasof each other are seldom less than a generationbehindhand, and generally more is how a newhistorical development in new conditions anddestined to take new forms, may be, and actually inNorway is, arising once more. The electric utilisa-tion of a single waterfall is now yielding 150,000horse-power ; and though this is certainly one of thevery greatest, there are smaller ones almost beyondnumber for a thousand miles. Norway, then which


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52 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONhas so long seemed practically to have reached its smallnatural limits of wealth, industry, and population asto have long fallen out of all reckonings of the GreatPowers, of which it was the very forerunner has nowbroken through these limits and begun a develop-ment, perhaps proportionately comparable in theopening century to that of our own country in thepast

one yet with what differences ? Our IndustrialAge in its beginnings, and indeed too long in itscontinuance, turned upon getting up coal almostanyhow, to get up steam almost anyhow, to runmachinery almost anyhow, to produce cheap pro-ducts to maintain too cheap people almost anyhowand these to get up more coal, more steam, moremachinery, and more people, still almost anyhowand to call the result " progress of wealth and popula-tion." Such swift multiplication of the quantity oflife, with correspondingly swift exhaustion of thematerial resources on which this life depends, hasbeen too much as our coal-economists now and thensternly remind us like that of the mould upon thejam-pot, which spreads marvellously for its season,until at length there is a crowded and matted crustof fungus-city, full of thirsty life and laden with in-numerable spores, but no jam left. The comparisonis harsh, is even hideous, yet is necessary to berealised : for is it not the goal to which our own andevery other " Black Country " is hurrying that of amultitudinous population at too low standards oflife ; a soil too limited for agriculture, even


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WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 53where not bricked or ashed over ; in short, of meanand miserable cities subsiding upon exhaustedmines.From this doleful picture of the logical outcomeof one set of conditions, turn now to image thatarising on the opposite shores of the North Sea, fromthe streams of " white coal," each and all inexhaustiblewhile the earth spins, and its winds blow over thesea, and the Norse mountains stand. Yet insteadof Norway forming cities like ours upon these un-ending streams of energy, these for the most partgenerate but long chains of townlets, indeed ofcountry villages, in which this strongest of races neednever decline, but rather develop and renew theirmastery of Nature and of life again as of old ; witheverywhere the skill of their ancient dwarf-kings,the might of the hammer of Thor. Are there nothere plainly the conditions of a new world-phen-omenon and world-impulse a Norseman aristo-democracy of peace which may yet eclipse all pastachievements, whether of his ancient democracy athome or even (who knows ?) his aristocracy of con-quest and colonisation abroad among older dis-couraged peoples, and even his settlement of a newpatriciate upon their comparatively exhausted lands ?What are the essential applications of these newenergies, besides electric lighting and power fortramways, railways, etc. ? These uses are largelymetallurgical that is, on the central lines of theworld's progress, from the Stone Age onwards. The


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54 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONelectric furnace not only gives an output of iron andsteel, greatly cheaper (it is said already as much as50 per cent.) than heretofore, but of the very finestquality ; so that not only our British steelworks, butthose of Pittsburgh also, must before long be feelingthis new competition.The command of the new metals like aluminium,of the rare metals also every year becoming moreimportant, which the high temperatures of the electricfurnace give, involves further new steps in metal-lurgy. Again, the conditions for labour and its realwages, in the innumerable garden-towns and villageswhich are springing up in these conditions, eachlimited in size by that of its stream, and thus con-tinuous with glorious and comparatively undestroyednatural environment, afford an additional factor ofcompetition, more permanently important than arethose of money wages and market prices. Thefavourable situation of these new towns, mostly upontheir fiords, is again full of advantages, and thesevital as well as competitive.

Again, the regularisation of streams, with the in-crease or formation of lakes as power reservoirs, putsa stop to the spring floodings, which are a frequentsource of damage in mountain countries ; and it furtheradmits of a not inconsiderable by-product, in fishculture.

Further, it may be remembered how, not so manyyears ago, one of our foremost chemists, Sir WilliamCrookes, called attention to the approaching scarcity


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WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 55of nitrogen for the world's wheat crops, associatedwith the rapid exhaustion of the nitrate beds of Chili,etc. But now the problem of utilising the nitrogenof the atmosphere for the production of saltpetre hasbeen solved, even better than in Germany, by theNorse chemists and engineers. In such ways thecountry hitherto the poorest of all in agriculture,beginsnot only to develop more intensively its own soil, butto increase the fertility of all our Northern world.

Such electric development, of course, is not Nor-wegian alone ; Sweden and Finland already begin toshare it, and still more Switzerland, which is rapidlyundergoing, under the influence of electric industries,a development fully comparable to that by which inthe last couple of generations she has adapted herselfto the tourists of the Western world. Down from theAlps, along the long mountain backbone of Italy, thesame white collieries are opening, and from this mainaxis of the coming Industrial Europe there run outcorresponding lines on every hand. Here France,which it has been so long the fashion in industrialBritain or Germany to think of as having fallen hope-lessly behind, alike in industries and population, seesnew resources opening before her, in her large shareof the Alps, her Northern Pyrenees, even her centralmountain mass with its considerable river courses.Even Spain, with all its drought, and barrenness, andpoverty, begins to see a new future of internalcolonisation, compensating not a little, as her fore-sighted citizens already realise, for the loss of her


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56 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONcolonies, that vast empire she left too undeveloped.Or pass eastwards. Though Austria of old failed toconquer Switzerland,

she has her own Switzerland inthe Tyrol, and Hungary her broad girdle of the Car-pathians. Similarly, and in some considerablemeasure, for the new nations of the Danube and theBalkans. So in Asia Minor, as for Albanians andtheir neighbours, there lies an opportunity for theyoung Turks beyond their constitution-makings atthe centre and repressions at the circumferencethat of organising a reconstitution indeed. Withthe Turkish Empire we are, of course, entering moreand more fully upon the region of drought ; and herethe

questionarises of the desiccation of Asia and

the evolution of its deserts.We cannot enter here upon the difficult and stillunsettled question of how far this evolution of desertsis a cosmic process, destined sooner or later to bringthe world into the condition upon which Mr PercivalLowell so vividly insists for Mars. There is alsomuch reason for the view that this desiccating pro-cess has been due, if not to the neglect of man, atany rate largely aided by this ; largely, too, to themischiefs of ages of war, in destroying irrigation-worksand terraces everywhere, of which the vestiges arefar more important and conspicuous survivals ofantiquity than even are the temples and palaces ourarchaeologists explore. Far beyond wilful destructionof irrigation-works is their wastage, through thatmingling of material neglect and fiscal extortion, to


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WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 57which the decline of the vast Turkish Empire, andwith it the Persian also, is so largely traceable. It isnot necessary here to inquire how far this is due tothe ignorance of pastoral and military conquerors likethe Turks, and how far to that passive acceptance ofthe practical unmodifiability of the Arabian desert,which has been so decisively expressed in the philos-ophy and the faith of Islam. The reason for refer-ring to such apparently far-away matters will becomeclear if they help us to reflect how far our own par-ticular racial origins and regional experience, our lackof experience also, and how far our particularestablished philosophy and its corresponding popularbeliefs, may likewise interfere with our neededindustrial and social modernisation. For after all,between the conservatism of the Turk and theconservatism of the Briton there is not so very widea difference as the latter is given to concluding.And ifany wonder how we come to such an opinion, weanswer that it has not been formed without some con-tact, both provincial and metropolitan, with the Turk.Yet there is here no real pessimism ; for withTurkey, Persia, even China,showing signs of followingthe example of Japan in adopting Occidental methodsand ideas, there is every hope that our own countrymay also follow the exhortation of its present king,and wake up in its turn. But, it may be said, are wenot of all the Occidental peoples that very one whoseindustrial greatness and whose correspondingly freepolitical institutions are being copied by all these


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58 CITIES IN EVOLUTIONawakening countries ? When we thus so admittedlylead, to suggest here that we lag may seem not evenparadoxical, but flippant absurd, some may s

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